Surprisingly, the guard looked more cowed than pissed, but that didn’t mean that the mayor was ready to step down off his soap box.
“The issue here is that you deliberately violated the rules,” he started to explain, but Nate didn’t let him get farther.
“By doing what? None of us came anywhere near your precious little town. We stayed here, with our cars, while you deliberately shit all over every single item in the agreement we all signed. Now we’re about to leave, and still you treat us like criminals. You must be real proud of your accomplishments.”
The mayor’s face darkened, but sadly, he didn’t go off like I would have. Narrowing his eyes, he looked at all of us again before a satisfied smirk took hold of his features. “Our radios are about to start working any minute now. By the time you roll out of Harristown, the entire network will know that you’re just a lying, deceiving, extorting bunch of scumbags. Don’t expect another town to open their gates for you ever again.”
I really didn’t care for the implications of that, but Nate didn’t even blink.
“You do that. We’ll be happy to report our side of the ongoings as well,” he said, then glanced at Jason. “You and your guys ready to beat it?”
“Hell, yeah,” Jason agreed.
And so it came that as the sky started to turn yellow, our cars left the settlement, one vehicle at a time. Burns went first, driving our most offensive patient outside before any further altercations could arise. Jason went next. We were third. I couldn’t help but sigh with relief as we made it outside and still no shots had been fired at anyone. While the other cars started lining up next to what had once been the road out of town—now terminally churned into mud just as the meadow all around it—I eased the Rover through a few slow maneuvers, then gunned it up to top speed, going in circles this way and that to make sure the steering worked properly again. I might have whooped a little. Nate smiled. As the others took off rolling toward that slope I’d nearly not made it down this morning, I accelerated and rounded the entirety of the settlement one last time. We’d been thorough about the cleanup, but the ground was still drenched with gore and littered with body parts. Carrion eaters—four-legged and winged alike—were everywhere, a black cloud lifting into the air as I threatened to go right through them. On all sides the palisades had held, but there were a few weak spots that I hoped the townspeople would repair soon. In the distance we saw what remained of the pyres send a few last tendrils of smoke up into the otherwise cloudless skies, no traces of the sappers or their vehicles remaining. Upriver, not a single shambler stirred, which was a good thing.
Completing the circle, we closed up to the last car making its way into the countryside, and we left what counted for civilization these days behind us.
Chapter 9
We made it about twenty miles northeast from the settlement before we called it a night. We might no longer have been hungry, but we were all tired, the less than stellar welcome of the townspeople weighing on all of us. We also had a man with less than forty hours left to live, which made all the sneering and suspicion pale in comparison. I hadn’t exchanged more than a word or two with him, hadn’t known he existed more than a day ago, and still I felt a weird kind of bond with him. And unlike the people in Harristown, none of us was shying away from Phil when Jason and Charlie helped him out of the car once we’d set up camp. Seeing him pale and sweaty reminded me so much of Innes that it made me physically sick all over again, but no one else—not even Phil himself—looked glum so I forced myself to act as if nothing had happened.
Turned out, there was one single advantage to dying like this—you could attend your own wake. And when Phil expressed his immediate concern that he felt like he deserved to get stone cold drunk one last time, we were happy to oblige him. What should have been one hell of a depressing evening quickly turned into a veritable celebration.
I’d had a good feeling about the Chargers from the start, but as evening turned to night, I realized that they really were a bunch not unlike us. Like we had Pia, they had Charlie, who took it as his personal responsibility to bust any ass that might need busting. Each on their own they were a force to be reckoned with. Together, they were unstoppable. Within fifteen minutes a perimeter was established, watch times agreed on, food distributed, and Phil was polishing off his first aluminum cup full of Scotch—the good kind that Jason had pilfered from a liquor store last fall, kept for a special occasion. So we ate, and we drank; we laughed and told stories, keeping a low fire burning in our midst to serve as much as illumination as to keep us cozy and warm. As usual I was sitting between Burns and Martinez, every so often glancing across the fire pit at Nate. Tonight of all nights I might have preferred his company—or at least a hefty dose of that booze going around—but this night wasn’t for us. It was for our new friends. So we took all the night guard shifts, and made sure to remain sober enough to actually be of use when our time was up.
It was well past ten—usually the time when things started to quiet down, mostly because early sunrise meant more hours of daylight we could spend on the move, and Pia didn’t believe in letting us waste any—when Burns asked how the Chargers had all found each other. Jason and Charlie shared a few glances, and it was Charlie who launched into the story.
“Easy, really. Most of us were members of the South Colorado militia. We had an informal exercise planned for the weekend when the shit hit the fan. So we found ourselves, armed to the teeth, food and preserves ready, with our children and wives in the middle of nowhere, in the woods north of Grand Junction. Took us a few days to realize what was going on. The first wave passed us by without us even knowing anything had happened. We lost a couple of people when the Denver area started to empty out, but the warnings about the contaminated food hit us before that could become a problem. We did well until the winter.”
His marked pause made my stomach sink, although the general air of levity remained.
Jason picked up where his friend had left off.
“People got sick. The real flu, not this zombie crap. We did well with fortifying our hideout, but we didn’t expect the winter to get so cold so soon. Lost about a third to the cold and diseases that, a year ago, would have barely been a reason to keep the kids home from school for a couple days. That drove us out to look for meds, which got another bunch of us killed. If we hadn’t run into some traders heading east from Utah, we wouldn’t have made it through the winter. They convinced us to pack everyone up and come with them. Best decision we ever made.” The others seemed to agree with him, even though the mood remained—understandably—subdued.
Charlie took over once more when the booze reached Jason.
“Then spring came, and it got harder to ignore that there wasn’t really a place for us in the town anymore. All of us, we lost every relative that we had. Those who still had families, they stayed, but we decided to leave. The town needed everything from clothes to preserves to electronics, and who was better suited to go out than those who didn’t have much left to lose? When we heard about the treaty, things were a done deal for us. After months of inactivity, being out here sounded like a damn good alternative to planting crops and bringing in the harvest. Although we might still help with that in the summer. Our people agreed that we could come home and stay for however long we want any time. I’m sure they’d be happy to extend the same to you if we tell them we sent you.”
Nate shrugged but didn’t look very tempted by the offer. Utah, not a state I’d figured I’d want to settle down in. Then again, I’d never been there, and after last winter, hunkering down somewhere with a little less than several feet of snow wasn’t the worst idea. Just made me wonder how much the warmer climate would draw the shamblers come fall. Unlike me, Nate managed to keep his tone level as he replied. “Thanks, man. Maybe we’ll take you up on that later in the year.”
Some jokes followed as the bottle made another round, until Jason glanced at our bunch in particular. “So how did you guys meet? And what’
s with the wrong head count?”
Nate looked at me as if he wanted to give me the chance to answer that question, but I refrained, preferring to hide behind the bread I was industriously munching on.
“We set out as thirteen this spring, but lost one man before we got to Aurora. Seemed only fair to add him to the list, even if he couldn’t annoy the fuck out of us anymore. And ‘thirteen’ sounded better than ‘twelve.’”
“Could have made it a dozen,” Charlie offered.
“Too ominous,” Burns interjected. “And too much brainpower needed to count.”
Martinez didn’t let that slide by uncommented. “For you, maybe, big guy. The rest of us have no issues counting to more than we can with our fingers.”
Burns answered with a bright smile. “And some of us can just count in inches.”
That made me groan loudly. “Hate to break it to you, but as most of us can attest after the spectacle today—and trust me when I tell you that none of us wanted to know—that’s not thirteen inches that you have dangling between your legs.”
Of course that made his smile grow—and hopefully only his smile, or else I was so going to get my shotgun between us. “Just because the water was cold. Gimme five minutes and you can get your ruler ready.”
Snorting, I shook my head. “You’re such an ass.”
“Dick,” he corrected me. “The word you were looking for is dick.”
It was impossible not to let the chorus of laughter get to me, and I shook it off with a smile. “Remind me why I put up with you again?”
Burns had an answer for that, too. “Because you’d get bored out of your mind without me. Easy as that.”
Jason had watched our conversation with that intense fascination only drunk people could muster, now glancing between us on the one side and our little command huddle, as usual without me, on the other. “Let me guess. You guys are all former military. Marines maybe?”
“Army,” Nate was quick to correct him.
Jason snorted. “Figures. And explains a lot. But you,” he pointed at me, “you’re not a soldier. No offense, but I’ve been around service members most of my life. You just don’t have that same vibe to you.”
I waited for one of the guys to make a crude comment, but when they all kept their traps shut, I shrugged. “None taken. I’m not a soldier. I’m a scientist. Or was. Not much science to do these days when you’re out on the road.” On some level that still felt like a lie, but it was the truth.
Some murmurs rose among the Chargers, and it was Charlie who summed up the gist of it. “So, let me guess, you were with USAMRIID and they were your security detail when you embarked on a secret mission to save the world or some shit?”
I realized that I must have drunk more than I’d wanted to when I couldn’t help but let out an embarrassing, braying laugh. Looking across the fire at Nate, I got a smirk back from him. “I wish,” was what I finally replied. “I never even touched a gun before the world as we knew it went to hell.”
“Private sector then?” Jason guessed, looking at Nate for confirmation when I started laughing again.
“I needed her help for a mission,” Nate replied. “Unofficial business. It’s a little complicated.”
Jason started to look slightly irritated at my antics so I tried to shut up, but it wasn’t easy, particularly when Martinez smirked at me. Yeah, that again. Damn contamination shower. I should have never told any of them about that.
“Doesn’t sound like it,” Charlie interjected. “You plan your mission. You recruit her. She helps you. You end up sticking together. Not quite so different from what we’ve heard from people all over.”
Nate opened his mouth to reply, but this time I was faster. “What you just said would have been what everyone else but him would have done. The sane thing, you know? But that’s never what he does. Same as other groups are happy to raid malls while we have to go into a fucking overrun city and chase down supercharged zombies, just for kicks and giggles.”
Nate gave me a sharp look. “The point was to find out how hard they are to kill. It wasn’t all just fun.”
“Stressing ‘just,’” I harped at him before I turned back to Charlie and Jason. “He didn’t recruit me. Not in the sense you normally would. Like approach someone, tell them of your plan, convince them to see reason, and they help you. No, he stalked me, got his pet hacker to open up all my records. Then he tracked me down, posing as a harmless jogger in the park. He seduced me. We had some weird kind of deranged, fuck-like-teenagers-on-steroids kind of affair that lasted a couple of weeks. And one afternoon he texts me to check if I’m still at work. In the lab at the biotech company I was working for. And next thing I know these idiots blow up half the building. They chase me through the air ducts. They actually shot me out of the air ducts,” I said, stressing that part. “After they caught me, they almost got me strangled by one of their other hostages, who tried to keep me from being able to cooperate with them. I had no other option but to help them, really, only to get slapped in the face by one of the most insane conspiracy theories ever. Next thing I know, this other bunch here,” I pointed at Martinez, Cho, and Burns, “think it’s funny to blow a few more holes into the building, letting in a raging horde of zombies. Then the whole building comes down on us and I think to myself, shit, this is the worst day of my life. But, guess what? I jinxed it. Because the following weeks were way worse. Plus, I have to put up with these idiots ever since.”
I was waiting for Nate to add that my recount was wildly exaggerated, but he only grinned back at me. “You did forget the part where it was all about preventing the zombie apocalypse, only that we were too late.”
“That’s the part you feel I neglected to add?” I snarled back, glaring at him. Might have made more of an impact if I hadn’t been grinning at the same time.
Jason’s raucous laughter cut off anything else I might have added. Pia used that moment to offer her objections.
“Romanoff had you rounded up fifteen minutes after we took over the building. If you’d stayed with him, I wouldn’t have had to chase you down twice. If I’d wanted to shoot you, you would have been dead in that bacteria room.”
That put a momentary damper on my twin outrage and mirth. “You knew that I was hiding in there?”
I got a shrug in return. “Suspected it. Not many more places to go.”
“And you still shot at me? You could have killed me! And you knew that he,” I nodded toward Nate, “wanted my cooperation.”
The blank stare she directed at me made my blood run cold. The slight smile that replaced it wasn’t much better. “I never agreed with that part of the plan,” the Ice Queen retorted, again proving that I’d picked the right monicker for her in my mind. “He had the training, he didn’t need you. You were a wild card at best, a liability at worst. I figured that if I could make you hide for long enough, he would go on with the plan without you. But you were too clumsy to stay out of sight, so we wasted useless hours before we could execute the final stage. Without that, we would have been long gone by the time the other team could track us down and almost foil our plan.” That it had all ended up being pointless didn’t seem to matter. Typical.
I continued to stare at her for a couple more moments before I elbowed Martinez in the ribs. “See, the only reason why we ever met was because I suck at stealth.”
He grinned and put his hand over his heart, leaning in as if to kiss me. “My life would be so dull without you in it, chica.”
After eyeing all of us with bewilderment still strong on his features, Charlie shook his head. “How do you guys even sleep at night without being afraid that she’ll just up and shank you out of spite?”
Nate shrugged, not a hint of concern in the lines of his body. “She’s loud. She can be vindictive as hell. But she’s smarter than that. Even if she doesn’t always sound like it.”
I couldn’t let that sit on me like that. “Gee. And I know someone who won’t get laid any time soon.”
Nate completely ignored me as he went on recounting my finer qualities.
“She also picked up a few unsavory habits from us, like talking trash all day long. Then again, they offered her to take over the lab in Aurora and she still stuck with us, so maybe the smart part isn’t quite that true.”
Turning to Burns, I gave his knee a suggestive nudge with mine. “Do you have a ruler? Because the more I think about it, the more curious I get. No idea why.”
Burns laughed, which went partly ignored by the rest when Pia grew tired of me constantly sidetracking the conversation and finished the recount of how our glorious bunch had come together.
“Most of the members of our former group decided to set out on their own, but a few of the soldiers they’d sent to stop us joined us. We picked up Santos over there just before leaving the city, and met up with the rest at our reinforced bunker, where we spent the winter. Some stayed behind to help guard our civilians, the rest of us set out on the road. Lewis isn’t completely wrong when she says that Miller here has a thing for idiotic missions, but that you already know, as that is how we met. End of story.”
I was surprised to hear that she agreed with me, and even more so as I clearly didn’t count among said “civilians” any longer. More so than anything any of the guys could have said that made me feel like I really had made the right decisions—over and over again. And how could I have known that crawling into the air ducts would end up with me beaten and bruised?
Momentary silence settled, all of us thinking about one particularly fond memory or another, I was sure. Phil broke the spell a while later, almost too inebriated to talk—but then again, he had a reason to. “Tell us how you took down the cannibals. When we heard about that, Jason bitched around like a little girl for a week. Said he wanted us to do the trick.” His eyes glazed over for a moment before they focused on me. “No offense?”
Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 2 | Books 4-6 Page 13
